This is something that I really would like to solve, but it's a complicated problem. My personal preference is to try and move the game back to 5 Players, but that'll require ramping up the difficulty quite a bit. If the community has ideas to make this work, I'd be glad to hear it.

I agree that a duo lane currently isn't offering any real benefits to heroes, especially with the competition to last hit between a chunk of radiant defenders and your allied hero. Heroes placed in a solo lane grow a bit too quickly and make the game trivial, while a duo lane (especially with poor itemization or lacking splash) grows a bit too slowly and will usually wipe by golems/ghosts if not given any help.

The simplest solution would be to reintroduce a "hard" lane with double spawns that could provide for 2 heroes, but I think that this is not a good idea because it will end up with whoever has more splash early dominating even harder. Adding a 4th spawning lane would also require some editing to the terrain, and I don't know if you want to do that.

With that said, there IS a lot of farm lying on the map right now that isn't utilized: the jungle! We have it scattered across ~5 areas:

Base (1 Medium + 1 Hard Camp)

In my experience, ANY hero can jungle with 2 Orbs of Venom --> Stout/Wand --> Core Items by stacking the Wildwing camp in base and pulling a Radiant Defender from the Ancient for a quick level 2, and then slowly stacking the 2 camps in base until they hit level 5-6 with Boots, Splash, and some Sustain (~1 minute before Roshan arrives, when solo lanes are around level 8-9.)

Radiant Jungle (1 Easy + 2 Medium + 2 Hard Camps)
Radiant Offlane (1 Medium Camp + 1 Ancient Camp, Requires Blink)

I don't see the Jungle being farmed unless it's a Chen/Enchantress player that got lost from normal DotA, and there's currently no way to immediately farm the Radiant Jungle from level 1 for most heroes, because the trip to the fountain is way too far away. However, with heroes like Venomancer or Beastmaster with strong summons that do Piercing damage, clearing the whole jungle every minute is ~as fast as a solo lane of experience.The Ancient camp has a ramp that is only accessible from mid, so it requires a Blink Dagger to have any sort of reliable method of clearing.

Dire Safelane (1 Hard Camp, Draws top lane Aggro)
Dire Jungle (2 Ancient Camps)

Both of these camps are very far out of the way; I believe that terrain changes prevent cliff jungling of the Dire Ancients without a Blink Dagger, and the Hard lane camp requires you stealing creeps from your top-laner to get anything done. When this camp auto-stacked, it was normally cleared whenever you were pushing the tier 1 tower.

In summary, there's "enough" farm on the map as is, but a combination of sustain + mobility prevents heroes from using it like a normal lane. I think that a few small buffs could make a duo jungle viable (possibly 1 person in base, 1 person in Radiant jungle, or 1 person in Dire Jungle.)

TL;DR
http://imgur.com/xonwZw6

Addressing lower Bounty from Jungle vs. Lane Creeps:

- Increase jungle creep EXP bounty, so that a hero who jungles stays even on levels, but lower on gold. (Heroes with strong spells, or go Midas, remain useful.)

OR:

- Reduce jungle creep respawn timer from 60 to 45, or even 30 seconds. Possibly reduce creep camp spawn box sizes. Makes early game stacking much more efficient for people who want to go that route. May require reducing bounty of creeps to 3/4 or 5/8 of normal value.

Addressing limited Sustain options for Jungling Heroes:

- Make a few Radiant Defenders gather inside the Radiant jungle, where they can be pulled to different neutral camps
- Create a small healing spot in the Radiant and Dire Jungles that are difficult to access from the lane itself, but allows somebody who is jungling there to slowly regen health and refill their bottle instead of going back to base. (Indicated by Fountain Icons, Red means blocked path, Green dots should be only "easy" way of accessing healing, so laners can't use it without losing a lot of time.)


Addressing Mobility and Distribution of Jungle:

- Add 1-2 Easy Camps to the Radiant Base (Blue Circles)
- Add 1-2 Ancient Camps in the Dire Jungle (Red Circles)
- Add 1-2 Medium Camps next to Dire Offlane's Ancients (Green Circles)
- Remove the cliff ledges that separate the Radiant Offlane's Medium and Ancient Camps, move Dire Safelane's Hard Camp here (Purple Lines)
- Add Ramp between Radiant Jungle's leftmost Hard Camp and the Medium Camp in the middle (Purple Lines)
- Allow rightmost Radiant lane to access Dire Offlane/Ancients (Purple Lines)
- Allow area left of Roshan pit in River to access Dire Ancients (Purple Lines)
- Increase Leash Radius of creeps so that Radiant Defenders can be pulled into jungle, possibly making Radiant Defenders gather further outisde the base? (Orange Lines)

As a picture: http://imgur.com/xonwZw6

Edit: I had made 2 separate maps, but imgur deleted 1 of them so I had to fuse everything together, sorry it looks like a mess :(

Finally, for fun because I just pulled an idea out of my ass:

In Roshan's Pit: Place a Mound of Gold inside the Rapier Ogre's cave. Hitting the Gold Mound will cause it to drop a Small Gold Bag and give the attacker +30 gold, but also Enrage the Ogre, giving him a permanent +3 MS, +3 Attack Speed, and +25 Health. Each hit has a small chance of spawning a Boss monster for the current wave - 1. Gold Mound disappears when the Ogre Boss is slain.

At the Dire Offlane's Tier 1 Tower: Put a neutral Ogre creep there that enemies ignore. Make it obvious that he's carrying gold. Hitting him makes him run away from you, but does no damage. Shepherding him into you fountain gives you a MASSIVE amount of gold/experience (the process should take a good 5-10 minutes). The Ogre randomly farts when you hit him; anything player-controlled behind him after a couple of seconds warning is instantly killed.

Originally posted by Pory:

I agree that a duo lane currently isn't offering any real... *NOT GONA QUOTE :3 tis too mush*

Ohoho! lemme tell you a little story.. no, 5 little stories about me deciding to jungle, and then my teammates seeing this, calling me idiot, norom, game waster, and then leaving the game. Even if they didn't leave, they're feel like a necessary thing to call me names, and also mention that by the game's end as well like "we did all the work, u just jungel", even though I was clearly helping with bosses and pushing.

I had the idea about double-creep lane too, but I didn't though of the splashers. The 4th hero needs something to be busy with.. For now I only can think about making two "mini-lanes" right near the fountain, instead or with 2 camps. Those mini-lanes would occasionally spawn some creeps that would start kicking ancient. That would be the lane for the 4th player. Or the same, but instead of lane, there would be flying units, that would travel by the map's border, through trees, getting out near fountain to attack the ancient.

Right now, jungle creeps are balanced enough to provide with smooth, lane-like farm, and when you know when to switch to ancient creeps - you're actually start to farm faster than lane can provide you with, so I think there is no need to touch that. I'd personally add few one-way teleports from spawn to jungle(use Underlord's Reality Rift for that). That would allow any player to go jungle right from fountain, and then tp back to their lane.

About the near-fountain jungle - you can actually pull creeps under ancient's tower, weaking them greatly. And, if you remove all the trees near camp - you can pull them under both towers, also triggering creeps-defenders.

"regen spot" - Its already there, and is called shop :D Once you get lifesteal, you're usually have no need in regenerating health.

That's true, there is often not enough farm for 2 players. I stopped playing 5p mainly because of this. At some point, 5p_easy is more difficult than 4p_medium.

Yet, I must say that lane situation had improved greatly since I was posting here last time. Half a year ago, 2 players doing top together would be 10 levels behind if not more.

This is really complicated, I don't know what to suggest, I'll just write a few ideas.
1. I like the idea with roaming support, but it's not going to happen very often.
2. 1 top, 1 mid, 1 bot, and the 4th player goes jungle. Probably with a hero that can jungle from lv 1 in normal dota. There are more possibilities - orb of venom, quelling blade with cleave etc. But I didn't try this a lot, so I don't know if that hero will be behind in exp/gold.
3. A hard lane. Maybe with double spawn, or something. Yet, as people said, one player might be able to take most last hits leaving his lane partner with no gold, but at least their levels aren't lower!


Well, as I said, I don't know how to change lanes in a way so everyone gets equal farm,but I'd like to tell what happens sometimes with current balance:

match id - 2458232652
Unfortunately, I didn't take any screenshots.
Sniper abandoned game in the beginning because he didn't get solo lane. In my previous match, he also left game for the same reason! I don't know how many games he was leaving like that. But as you can see, sometimes people fight for lanes, and things don't end well.
As for that match. Tiny also left. Me and Alchemist kept playing and won, was fun.

>if the community has ideas

Here are ideas. I usually play this mode as centaur, and it's autowin if you get solo mid and push before 20 minutes. This works best with 3 people, and having more doesn't help.

To rectify this, I tried the 4 player mode with everyone having a lane farming carry and I played support cm, rotating between bottom, the jungle, fountain jungle camps etc. I managed to get all the towers upgraded and had my tranquils and solar crest for fighting bosses mid by the time the second boss came. Then, my carries didn't push at 20 minutes. I thought I'd be fine because I upgraded towers, but no, one carry away from tower means third boss wave (ghosts) will destroy the lane's tower and rax no matter upgrades.

Because the third wave will destroy your base whether you upgrade towers or not and the only way to fix this is to push before it happens or have a tank pull creeps off the tower entirely, upgrades are a waste of money. What this means, in effect, is position 4 and 5 don't have anything to do, because upgrading towers is a money pit that will end up not helping much.

In a real dota match, supports have things to do the entire game, but warding, stacking, pulling etc are way less important here than they are in actual dota.

My 2 cents:

Make Dire base way harder to kill, so carries have to farm more than they currently do to get it destroyed.

As Dire base is harder to kill, the radiant base will have to be kept alive longer, you need some way for supports to do this while the carries are pushing. Something needs to be added so people other than zeus and mjolnir builders can do this. It'll probably involve buffing AOE spells even further than they're already buffed.

Find a way to make bosses more dangerous to heroes and less dangerous to towers. Instead of running down towers unless a hero is right next to them, make the boss chase down heroes while the rest of the creeps siege base.

Your post about 1 way teleports is a good idea. Angel Arena Reborn has Radiant to Dire telepads and they're essential to that map.